The Times Scandal Is an Embarassment to Journalism

Jill Abramson got the back of the hand, and there is pure sexism marbled throughout this awful business. To ignore it is to be blind.

Once, in the pages of the magazine that rents me the building for this shebeen, I said that we should all be grateful for The New York Times because it did one thing better than anyone else did -- it could beThe New York Times. Not so much any more.

The sudden defenestration of Jill Abramson is an ongoing embarrassment to the profession of journalism. Worse, it's given every wingnut with Internet access a permanent stiffie, and it's given Dylan Byers of Tiger Beat On The Potomac a chance to brag about his perspicacity while, behind him, Arthur Sulzberger drinks a glass of water. It's hard to know which is the worst of the two outcomes.

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(And let us pause for a moment of silence for the repose of the soul of the career of Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy, who was last seen trying to walk back comments to Ken Auletta that, if true, would leave the Times open to a discrimination lawsuit that would have Pinch's great-great-grandchildren answering motions.)

I speak as one who took a paycheck from Mother Times for nine years at what was then its Boston-based subsidiary. There is no group of people on earth more deserving of an ensemble Liquid Plum'r enema than those people in the upper echelons of the New York Times Company. By and large, they are nasty, backstabbing careerists who would sell their white-haired grannies to Somali pirates for one more small step up the corporate ladder. When they are not being timid, they are being arrogant. (I watched them pretty much demolish the morale of a newsroom full of brilliant journalists at the Globe, as well as squashing the newspaper's individual identity. New editor Brian McGrory, and new owner John Henry, are bringing it back, thank god.) They have as much to do with journalism as Charlie Manson does with thoracic surgery. And they're calling the shots here.

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The only piece worth reading on the whole sorry mess is the one that Michelle Goldberg wrote for The Nation. (Scott at LGM beat me to it this morning, damn him.) She gets into the curious tale of TimesCEO Mark Thompson, who came to the newspaper from the BBC, where he was in charge when the Jimmy Savile sex scandal detonated.

But in a stroke of misfortune now common to Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s tenure as publisher, Thompson has found himself the subject of inquiry in a massive scandal involving an alleged serial pedophile, the now-deceased BBC-TV star Jimmy Savile. Thompson, a onetime news editor, was head of the network when a BBC documentary investigating Savile's predatory behavior toward teenagers-reportedly well known in BBC circles-was killed in favor of a celebratory retrospective. After denying any knowledge of the episode to Sulzberger, Thompson admitted that he had learned about the existence of a report on Savile at a cocktail party, but never knew its specific focus. This despite the seven different stories about the documentary in the British press, including a Daily Mail piece headlined "BBC Axes Exposé Into Jimmy Savile Teen Sex Allegations."

It turns out that Abramson tasked a reporter to do a long, informed piece on the scandal, which ran after Thompson had taken the job, but before he actually had started work. I'm sure that went down very well.

This was a major story about a powerful executive and a sexual abuse coverup, and Abramson was proving her editorial independence by covering it. '[T]rust in the BBC has plummeted because of a scandal set off in part by the network's decision to halt a reporting project on decades-old accusations of child sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, the network's longtime host of children's and pop music shows," wrote Matthew Purdy in a resulting piece. "Controversy over the canceled investigation was already brewing [the previous March]. It fully erupted in early October, just after he left and began preparing for his new job as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company." The suggestion Abramson should have ignored this story because it embarrassed a powerful Times hire says something troubling about the paper's priorities.

There's more, including the effort by some of the younger Sulzberger's to jack around with advertising, and the company' perpetually bungling efforts to get a handle on this whole Intertoobz thang. Jill Abramson got the back of the hand, and there is pure sexism marbled throughout this awful business. To ignore it is to be blind, or to be Dylan Byers.